


Après Moi

by prodigy



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Post-'Dreamer', Pre-Canon, Unrequited Implications, Unresolved Business
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 07:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20560670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigy/pseuds/prodigy
Summary: In March 2015, below the Institute, Gertrude Robinson gets lost.





	Après Moi

The cartons of juice took up space. If she could redo it all, she'd do without the cartons. Oh, the juice was a good idea--a wonderful idea, was her dizzy thought as she tipped another bottoms up to try to get the last traces of apple out, an essential idea--but not the cartons. The cartons took up space.

It was all the fault of clinics. You went to a clinic--you gave, or surrendered, blood--they gave you a little carton of juice. A box, to help you steady your own blood sugar. To feel entirely yourself again before you went on your way. So she picked up and readied herself to leave, finally; she made her that one last anticlimactic stop in the world above, the visible world, just at the shop--and what she thought of was clinics and those cartons of juice they gave you.

All over again, Gertrude reflected: all over again, she might change some things. One of them was she'd certainly just get a damned jug.

The world was still swimming. Or rather, the world consisted now only of a low tunnel of stone, going forward and down; the world was wriggling, more like. Fidgeting as she walked, in trainers ill-matched to her dress. Factoids rattled loose in her head, which she might've got from an Amnesty International presentation, once, or from late-night click trains, or from nowhere at all: _do you know what shoes most migrants and refugees the world over make their journeys in? Trainers, for people who have time to plan. For those driven out: whatever they have on their feet._

Which was she?

Hardly a refugee. She was a drop in the sea that drove them.

Nevertheless, when the time had come for her, she wasn't ready. But she'd had time to change into trainers.

There was little dust in Robert Smirke's tunnels. She'd been walking for... an hour, she estimated, but her shoes and laces were still white. She gave up on the last juice in the carton and consigned it, crammed it, into her bag; she closed her eyes and willed the sugar to absorb. Probably. However that worked--couldn't very well look it up down here. She had food, too, but it was a reward for making her halfway mark on her plan for the day's walking: her mental map of the shape Leitner told her he'd make for her with the tunnels.

(She'd looked at what he'd drawn, with the marks he made for turns--something like a mutated question mark. An interrobang that'd got very friendly with itself. Memorised it, six weeks ago on the top level of the tunnels, while he sat on his own rucksack and said: _We could set up a rendezvous_\--

_No. Too dangerous_, she'd said. But then felt bad, or maybe just polite, and she inclined her head: _Thank you for all your help, Jurgen_.

Gertrude remembered his smile and answering headtilt. She remembered because it was annoying. _Is everything alone with you, Gertrude_?)

He was annoying. She _was_ right. But, with her head squeezing in on itself, sick to her stomach and tired, her arm and her mind bundled in batting--she rather wished she had someone expecting her.

On her mental map she reached a junction, and so did her feet: at least Leitner knew what he was doing. Her intended turn, though, was half a turn, half a plummet on a staircase barely carved into the stone. Each narrow step was a bare concession. She contemplated going down on all fours, ladder-style: how many seniors died by falling, every year, in the United Kingdom? What shoes did migrants wear for their journeys? What good was this to her? 

She put her hand on the wall and descended, upright. The stone was cool, but not cold. Dusk, not midnight. The landing was much of the same.

* * *

Ariadne, famously, put a thread behind her. It was thus counterintuitive to be stumbling down and deep without marks. But Ariadne and Theseus had intended to leave.

In some ninety minutes Gertrude made her milestone--a room Leitner had marked in red--and stopped to rest, to unpack and peel open some hiker's rations. She still felt bloodless, in that she felt cold and hungry and resentful of the day's length: surely that was what that meant.

When she was finished she bundled the wrappers into the bag with the empty cartons and started walking. Within two turns from that, she was lost.

It turned out this was embarrassingly easy. She'd become confident, was the problem. (How many of life's problems had ensued after she'd become confident about something...!) She made a turn, and then another turn, and it was only after a minute of walking from there when she realised she'd gone the wrong way. It had been a three-way crossroads, in something like a stone anteroom: two gallerias, in a palace that would never receive a court, and a winding walkway. She went back, the uphill climb weighing her down (_that's not uphill that's heavy, Gertrude_ said something in her mind, _that's you_) but the directionality of the gallerias was hard to make sense of now. All widdershins. The geometry was all wrong. _Not my best subject_, she formulated--a dry rejoinder to no one.

Onward was foolish. Back the way she came was suicidal: this wasn't a pleasure jaunt. And staying in one place was good as backwards.

There was no knowing or Knowing. Her mental map was a useless, two-dimensional shape. And there was no Knowing that was not a connection to the Watcher: no connection not to Elias. Which she realised, anyway, was severed. For the first time she was making no effort to hide from him. She was just running from him.

For that reason, that strange chilly reason, she did try. She put her mind to Knowing. But it wasn't the pain from trying to make sense of the Stranger or the One Alone--it was nothing, it was just thinking about it.

She remembered a phone call she'd made to Elias about six years ago, from Washington State in America. She'd been avoiding him and at a certain point she just turned off her mobile entirely; then, prudently, tossed it into the Columbia River. But sooner or later she found she had a question for him, irritatingly, and ended up locating a pay phone in the city of Vancouver (US, though confusingly proximate to the Canadian one) and putting through a call.

If he was glad or vexed to hear from her, he kept it out of his voice; he had that snide way of playing emotional keepaway, of letting you know that if you wasted his time or put him aside, he had no compunction in wasting yours. Most of all with her, she knew. It was responsible for the great silences between them. But this time he bandied about only a few lines of small-talk, before he said, in his idle voice: _Is it worth going to all this effort to ignore me, Gertrude?_

_It's not very much effort._ She winced to remember. He'd a way of bringing out the juvenile in her, even now. The little spitfire. _And absolutely._

_I am a heart and you are a hand. Without you I'm powerless. Without me you're nothing. You and I are not you and I, you know; we're of a piece. You're never going to carve us apart._

She had cradled the receiver between her head and shoulder, because even then, she'd been multi-tasking: _You know, you've a remarkable gift of finding the most inappropriate wording for anything. Are you drafting a Valentine?_

A little chastened laugh, and probably an eye-roll: _Don't be childish._

Well, no signal down here. No payphone. No Knowing. The hand and the heart, wherever he was, were now equally at a loss.

And he had no map. She consoled herself with that, even though she, functionally, didn't either. Small victories. You had nothing at the end of your life--your in fact amazingly long life--except a thousand dreadful remembered selves, and everything they did. But you could still be petty.

* * *

She was falling asleep against a column, indecisive, when she saw the door: wooden, candy-red, painted with flowers like something from a folk museum in Zurich. She was in the prudent, self-preserving habit of ignoring doors. She was about to ignore this one, when it occurred to her she hadn't had to ignore the Spiral in quite a while now.

It was tempting. It always was. It spurred her to move, anyway: they were all weaker down here, but that didn't mean they were gone, she was proof of that. But--through there was being well and truly lost. Following the will o' the wisp off the path. But was she even on the path? Surely she was well and truly lost already.

Very good Spiral logic. She commended it. She kept walking. At least a few steps--

_You're so obstinate_; here the voice of commentary had the timbre of Michael Shelley. It sometimes did. So it went with guilt. _That's what no one ever understood about you, including Elias. They should stop trying to tempt you with things that will instead just tempt you to be bullheaded. The only lures you'll ever take have to look like your own idea._

Such a clutter of thoughts. So it was with the Spiral about, though. _Oh, Elias does understand that_, was her grim thought: to herself? To commentators no longer here to comment? It hardly mattered. _One thing he does understand. So you see me here._

_I suppose that's true._ Michael's laughter: funny to hear or imagine him laughing. She must have heard him laugh before--usually suppressed, politely. But when talking to someone else--_Well, Archivist? Is this your idea?_ He said in her head: --or outside of it?

"Everything anyone says is both inside your head and outside of it," said Michael from behind her, or to a side; "That's how perception works, _Mister_ Shelley. Outside of us there is some objective reality, or so we presume: but all we know are the signals. How our eyes interpret light. How our ears interpret sound. Philosophers have a field day. That's not-my-concern, Mister-Shelley. But it's always-worth-keeping-in-mind."

She looked.

It was strange to see Michael's form, distorted. It was stranger to hear him mocking her. Likelier that Michael Shelley, full of innocent blood, would grow, would twist and find angles where angles didn't come naturally, than that he would laugh: at _her_. It took her aback.

He smiled. "Hello, Miss," he said.

Gertrude stared. She was tired, and her feet hurt, and the door was still there, though Michael was sitting on a piece of stone furniture with his feet up such that she couldn't encompass both Michael and the door in the same field of vision; she focused on him. Her spectacles were dirty, but it seemed an undignified time to clean them.

There seemed little point in dithering. "Are you here to kill me?" she said.

Michael whistled, sort of. A thoughtful mouth-crumple. "I haven't made up my mind."

What she really needed was a nap. Her arm still throbbed--she wasn't the finest phlebotomist. She squinted, and--against her own impulses--took off her spectacles to clean them. "Well, please do decide," she said.

The galleria was blurry, and then it was clear again. The door moved, and Michael too--the door on the ceiling, Michael cross-legged on the floor. "I don't like deciding." Edge of a tantrum in his voice: also foreign. The Michael she'd known or not-known had always been sunny. "It's against my nature."

"Deciding is against everyone's nature," said Gertrude, more irritably than intended. "And yet we exist."

She started walking again. This was silly, as even if Michael weren't bound up in the Spiral, the god of many ways, he had longer legs than her. More or less everyone she kept company with had longer legs than she did, but it had always been the most awkwardly apparent with Michael and Gerry. They each had their own polite shuffle. "Go that way," came Michael's voice from over her shoulder.

Gertrude ignored it. A sigh, theatrical, from Michael: "Go _that_ way." He was in front of her, though politely backed up against a wall so she could walk past him. His hand was stretched out with a pointing finger, like a helpful sign.

She was cold. She'd brought a coat, knowing that the world below would be cold on Leitner's advisement, but not a full anorak; she hadn't thought it necessary, and also part of her had not really wanted to die in an anorak eventually. Most of her. She was starting to regret it. She folded her arms tightly around herself and walked.

Michael sprung between the corners of her peripheral vision, like a restless cat. When she was near to the end of the galleria in the direction she'd taken before, he spoke from squarely behind her. "Go that way, Miss. Unless you're so determined to meet your fellow."

Gertrude squinted ahead of her. What was that about getting under her skin?

"It means you like to just defy people for no reason at all," said Michael, in memory and around her, gaily. "Which usually serves you well. Who ever really knows?"

She turned, unresponsive, and trudged in the direction he indicated. Behind her, she heard him clap: first she thought it was just a single handclap of childlike delight, but then she realised it was applause. Sarcastic applause. It reverberated everywhere, in a shape of a chamber that wasn't the chamber she was walking through, off many walls, all the way up and all the way down. But not long after she set off, she found the staircase down.

* * *

The stone was more colourful with Michael about. Or perhaps he, distorted, had extended a piece of himself--itself. She could muse on the ontologies of her dead and betrayed friend all she liked, but the point was that he was having an effect on the environment. In a way she found it comforting; in another way it was unnerving, because her eye could never quite keep track of everything in its field of vision at once. This was always true, of course, but usually her mind sketched in the illusion better.

On her new path, off Leitner's diagram, she allotted herself another carton. Michael watched her open the straw; when she cradled her carton in both hands, his unnatural hand snaked out and nabbed an unopened carton from her bag, like a gull. She startled--he grinned--and then rolled her eyes and let it pass unremarked upon, as though this undid her fright. Then they both stood, drinking apple juice from cartons.

"Should've bought orange," Michael opined. "Or a mixture!"

When she was finished she crumpled her carton to compact it and stored it with the rubbish again. Michael peered at her. She considered not explaining, and then she thought better of it; or perhaps she was just weary and bored. "I can't exactly be strewing a trail of waste behind me. I don't intend to be travelling for long, but it would defeat the purpose."

Of course, she hardly imagined a tunnel-blinded Elias was going to be able to triangulate her location from a series of empty juice cartons. She could probably thank Robert Smirke for that. There was a time when she thought a great deal about Robert Smirke: not just in a present, practical sense, but from the vastest curiosity. She'd had decades to be curious in. For her as a young woman, Jonah Magnus was something of a shadow, which had a bit more of an allure than her fashionable, pre-world-weary, dreadfully jaded young self wished to admit; she was always reconstructing histories in her head. That time was gone. Now she could just think: thank God for Robert Smirke, and his strange obsessions.

Elias would probably be offended. She amused herself imagining his reaction, and him picking his way through the tunnels, in that persnickety way of his. But she knew it wasn't real. For one, neither her memory nor Michael's ambient unreality was any good at replicating Elias: he was a very specific, painfully real person. Nothing sounded like him, or should. And for two, he wouldn't be persnickety about finding her. There was no one more dogged when driven, more gracelessly determined. No one but her, perhaps.

Michael finished his juice and then, upon reflection, stuffed the carton whole into his mouth and swallowed. His Adam's apple bobbed, if you could call it that. He belched, a little high-pitched.

She realised she'd stopped to stare at him. This seemed to amuse him, and he made two beckoning motions with each of his elongated hands: "You should give me all the rest of the boxes, Miss."

"Why would I do that?"

"See, there you are again. See, now that I don't work for you, Miss, I can just say these things. You like to be sarcastic for absolutely no reason. Whereas I like to be sarcastic for a good reason." Michael tapped his closed mouth before he went on: "You should give me all of the waste you're carrying so you don't have to carry it. I can get rid of anything."

She must have looked at him--what was on her face? She hoped it wasn't fearful. Her skin felt thinner now that she was tired, bloodless--afraid. Afraid of Michael, no--well, a little. Afraid of other things. Of Elias now; of failure. "Or you can continue to carry it for no reason," Michael supposed out loud: "As you usually do."

Gertrude gathered the waste awkwardly in her hands and handed it over. Partly she was curious to see if he'd unhinge his mouth like a python. He did not: a door opened behind him on the floor and he tossed the wad over one shoulder without looking. "See! Easy."

"Thank you," she said. Her gaze drifted to the door, which shut, gently, and became an outline and then nothing.

"You're welcome, Miss."

She pursed her lips. They were dry. She should've brought lip balm--no, she should not have brought lip balm. Where did she think she was going? On holiday?

"Why do you call me that?" she said.

Michael smiled, which had a glitter to it. His teeth, but his lips too. His eyes. "I always thought 'ma'am' would make you feel old," he said. "I was being a gentleman. Me, a gentleman. Yes."

"No--" Gertrude glanced at him. "I mean you could just call me 'Gertrude.' This isn't 1899."

He peered at her, head on one side--very far to one side, in fact, but then upright again. When he stood straight ahead, leaning on the wall, he had the strongest semblance of human. Of himself. Then he shrugged, limberly, and he pointed again: "That way. Not down this time. Down is the Buried. Very unpleasant. Very sticky. Go that way."

She did; and, indeed, the colours didn't touch the innards of the staircase he warned her against. He followed, footstep after footstep after footstep.

* * *

The protection of the Eye was familiar to her. She'd felt the protection of the Lonely, too; she'd travelled in the company of Peter Lukas, the pale prodigal mirror of his forefathers. His thoughts were prisoned so tightly that not even she could unlock them. The ongoing presence of the Web was felt in the strands that she could sense a tug from at elbow and knee, now and then--not now, though--but all her life. The Desolation lent her its unwilling heart. But she had never expected to feel the embrace of the Spiral. She'd never really thought that it had one.

There was no question that she was within it, though. If nothing else, this was certainly not Robert Smirke's design aesthetic.

"Is Jurgen Leitner in here somewhere?" she asked Michael.

Michael had produced a balled-up tissue from somewhere and was endeavouring to juggle it. It was only one object, so this was a bit repetitive. "Everyone's somewhere in something," he said philosophically.

Back to an unhelpful mood, she supposed. He did elaborate eventually, though: "He's in the maze at some point, I believe, but not within my part of it. Haven't got room for every swain in your life."

"Please don't." This from her with all the patience of stone dragging over stone.

He laughed. "Sorry, Miss."

"Have you decided whether or not you're going to kill me?"

They'd come to another branching, or 'crossroads', of multicoloured corridors: something like lucid-dreaming Versailles above, and a staircase down into Borgesian brutalism, and then, oddly, a hole with a pole going down from the ceiling. Gertrude thought about dreamlike architecture for a few moments before Michael put a hand on the pole, spun nimbly around it without falling with a shade of Fred Astaire, and jerked his thumb downward.

She blinked. She didn't _say_ anything like: _I am not sliding down a fireman's pole_, but it definitely occurred to her.

"I am not going to kill you," said Michael from the other side of the hole in the floor. "But I am going to make you slide down a pole. It's fine, you'll be fine! I mean, you won't be any less fine than you already are."

This was, dreadfully, a point. She couldn't really muster a counter-argument that didn't focus on the silliness of the endeavour. What motivated her to go down, eventually, was the image of Elias also having to do this. (Though he would not. He was going the old-fashioned way; that was what she was counting on.)

It was a plummet, a bit terrifying, and not painless to her hands: it lasted only a few seconds, but she felt like she was hitting terminal velocity, and the imagined crack of her ankles breaking at the end flashed vivid in her mind.

They didn't. She was at her most brittle, now, in her life: past the ages of sturdiness, past the ages where you needed a cause to die, into the age of natural causes, of ageing gracefully, of going gently into that good night, of dying the good death. What that meant was that her bones were always poised to snap, her veins and arteries to puncture and burst. But not now--she was caught, lightly, in Michael's arms.

The drop was not a forceful one. She was cradled by him, which left her a little nonplussed. Her torch was still in hand. He smiled: it was a chivalrous grip under her shoulders and knees, like he meant to bring her over a threshold. And indeed that was what he did--he walked, carrying her, until they were through the next doorway, and then he set her down lightly on her feet.

She nodded, and meant to say thank you: but, awkward, she just nodded again. She waited for him to lead the way, but that wasn't his way. He just gestured, and she went ahead.

Down here there was music playing. At first it gave her a headache to put her mind to listening, but sooner or later she was bored, and tried to place the tune. Place, or arrange misleadingly into some sort of apophenia: did she really recognise it, or was she just rummaging within herself? Free-associating? A blot? Ah, hell.

An old song; most (not all!) songs she knew were old. The progress of human generations. Sic transit gloria mundi, or something.

_Oh, I know (yes I know) that the music's fine, like sparkling wine, go and have your fun--_

Something she'd heard many times. Once at a fundraising gala, in the early oughts. She ought to know more precisely than that: but she didn't. That was long after she really wanted to be going to fundraising galas, long after she thought they accomplished much other than appearances, and a hobby for Elias. But sometimes he did manage to wrangle her--_wear something nice_, he had instructed, and she'd turned up in something appropriate and utterly unmemorable. She remembered his raised eyebrows, and sigh, and the flicker of fondness in his grin, that she hated then more than the previous two things; _he_ was wearing something nice, anyway, though not that nice. But that wasn't on purpose, he just had bad taste. And the band had played a version of the Drifters song: and not even he'd had the temerity, in the early oughts, to ask her to dance.

She wondered if the music sounded like Michael, or if he would sing along with it. But he did not; he may as well have not heard it, though all things were his, and him, in this place-within-a-place. "Watch your step," he said as she went onward. "It's uneven from here, Miss."

_If he asks if you're all alone, can he take you home, you must tell him no--_

* * *

She wasn't feeling well. She was only (generally) mortal; it was going to catch up with her eventually. The blood loss, the hunger. More than anything else the fear: decades of fear had taught her that fear was draining, it dragged everything you to charge you with it at once in the moment, but then, once that was gone, even if the moment wasn't gone, even if the _need_ wasn't gone, it abandoned you. That was how you knew it came from an uncaring god, with one or many faces. It didn't have the decency to stay.

To age in a human body was to feel the encroachment of pain. (_**In** a body? Cartesian thoughts even now, Gertrude?_ Elias, remembered or imagined. He had a point.) She was in good health, in strong health, but it was the same for her. Her back didn't serve her any more; she tiptoed around it, and now it was feeling unsteady. And her lungs hurt and her head hurt. The colours around her, the distortions, hurt her.

She missed Gerry. There was no one she'd leaned on--logistically, physically--more than she'd leaned on Gerry Keay, though it had never been her intention. It'd been--her intention to do well by Gerry Keay. It'd been her intention to do well by so many people.

Michael wasn't Gerry. He hadn't even been the same before his death: and now they were both dead, and not, and she was determined to be alone, and wretchedly desperate for company. But it wasn't even Michael's she wanted. She wanted the company of someone she could bear to look in the face.

But he always came back around. This time directly in front of her, and looking at him was exactly what she did, into the bottomless blue of his eyes. He was expressionless, or if he had an expression it wasn't something humans knew.

He indicated a change of direction with one finger. She forced herself to look at him.

Up to this point she was telling herself that he was just a shade of Michael, and all Distortion. But it was a little late in the night, she supposed, for self-delusion.

"Why did you decide not to kill me?" she said. Her voice sounded thready, even to her.

(_\--You can dance, go and carry on, til the night is gone, and it's time to go--_)

She'd meant to look him in the eye, him and all that signified about the two of them, but not even she could hold that unbroken. She looked away; then, to her surprise, he reached an overlong arm out and tipped her chin back with his fingers. She reflexively smacked his hand away, like a teacher maintaining classroom authority. This seemed to amuse him--ever so briefly, fleeting in his eyes--and then he looked grave, in a strange way, if a fly's compound eye could be grave. "You're going to die soon anyway, aren't you?" he said.

It took her an instant to realise that this was a question, not rhetorical. She pondered the answers to it, as in a certain sense she felt on the brink of going-to-die-soon in every way, but that was just the past decade, one way or another. That was life. It didn't preserve anyone. If it did, it wasn't life.

She opted for more directness. "Yes. If I succeed or if I fail. --Obviously I'm hoping for one of those."

"Then I'd rather see how this goes," he said.

* * *

She was no longer keeping track of time well. All that reassured her, somewhat, that she wasn't in some grand trick or trap was that they were definitely going persistently down. Down and into the centre. That was always the aim.

Of course, Elias knew that too, so her destination was no mystery to him. All she had to do was to beat him there.

Michael walked nearly alongside her, rather than trailing like a puppy. It didn't escape her notice that the passages were growing narrower; but they were also growing longer, less twisting, more arcing. The way the Spiral had made was integrating once more into the structures that Robert Smirke had built and Jurgen Leitner had modified. The latter was tangible, bound by law and stone, written into reality in a language both true and readable: something that Elias Bouchard was well suited, even without his far sight, to navigating. The former was just that--a way. A way of desperation. A small, unearned mercy.

_Laugh and sing, but while we're apart don't give your heart to anyone--_

"Are you humming, Miss?"

It did surprise her to be interrupted with the question. She couldn't immediately tell if it was serious, either, or mocking in some way. She looked at Michael, some three metres behind her where he'd fallen back to trace some pattern on the wall. He looked serious. She didn't know how to answer his question, and frowned.

He abandoned the pattern, which reformed when his fingertips left it, and came up to join her again. His strides were long, when he had purpose. "You look unwell," he said. Whether he sounded bitter or concerned was something of a stereogram at the moment.

Gertrude exhaled. "Well--" She adjusted her bag, and felt an ache on her shoulder where the strap cut into it with its weight. "Sometimes appearances aren't deceiving, Michael."

Michael breathed in with a shiver, and a little smile tugged at his eyes. "You do, then," he said.

She hesitated.

"You know me," he said, and he sounded relieved.

She didn't know what to say. She leaned back against the wall, which was cold again: everything was cold. It was hard to imagine anyone complaining about things being hot any more. Heat was a young woman's complaint. You got older and everything got exceptionally cold. Or maybe that was just being ill; or maybe that was the throb of her arm. It was possible she was kidding herself, running circles for no reason, being batted about like a tennis ball between two unimaginable players, and at the end of her maze she would find her humiliation. In this moment she considered giving up running altogether. She almost considered convincing herself it had nothing to do with her difficulty looking Michael directly in the face.

He moved in and touched her. Just her forehead with the back of his hand, as though checking for fever. She doubted she had any, but her eyes were drifting shut.

"Are you going to keep running, Miss?" he said.

This brought a smile to her face, touched only a little with grimness. "I have places to go," she said.

"You'll need to rest."

"I can't rest. I have some work left unfinished, and I'm afraid no one else is going to complete it."

Michael chuckled. A little lower than his laugh from before--an unfamiliar noise. But maybe he'd just never made it to her. "You'll need to rest whether or not you can," he said. "That's the way you work."

"I can't. I can't, Michael. I can't."

He peered curiously at her. He seemed like half her vision, now, though she knew she was not.

"No one is left to protect you," he said. "You've made sure of that. But I imagine that's your object, Archivist."

She wasn't sure when she made the decision to sit down, exactly. She was underneath what looked like a fresco: a fresco, all in blue. Even now she looked for images of eyes. There were no images of anything, though. Nothing, just a tune in the hall, stuck in her head, and she slid down the wall to sit up against it, her legs up. He watched her, and then sat next to her bow-legged.

Gertrude glanced at him sideways. She wondered how certain he was that he wasn't going to kill her. She was also aware this was the sort of monstrous thought process that her life, specifically, brought her to always be having.

But it seemed that he was very certain. He rested his elbows on his knees, sort of, and he said idly: "No one is left to protect you. I can't follow where you go, ultimately. And I don't want to."

She let out a long breath.

"But no one will find you," said Michael, "as long as you're here with me. You can rest, Miss."

_So, darling--_

"I have a lot of things to do," she said, in a smaller voice than she intended, somewhere between weary and testy; "They aren't going to benefit you. You should know that."

"I know," said Michael, with deepest rancour. It was the oldest she'd ever heard him sound. Then, lighter--"Try resting. It'll be novel. I promise you'll wake up one more time."

She did.


End file.
